There is no evidence that Ukrainian athletes competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics are required to wear GPS ankle bracelets to prevent them from fleeing Ukraine to evade mobilization. No such announcement appears on the website of the Ukrainian Ministry of Youth and Sports or that of the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee. The claim appears to have originated with a satirical Russian Telegram channel.

Pro-Kremlin sources advancing this false narrative quoted Vadim Gutsayt, president of the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee, as supposedly describing the GPS ankle monitors as “a forced measure that will eliminate the risk of our athletes not returning.”

NewsGuard and Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake, which first fact-checked the claim, found no evidence of any such statement from Gutsayt on the website of Ukrainian National Olympic Committee or in local media reports. Moreover, under Ukrainian law, athletes and coaches are able to travel abroad uninterruptedly for 30 days at a time during martial law, which prohibits men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country and has been in effect in Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion.

A NewsGuard review of photo and video footage of Ukrainian athletes participating in the Paris 2024 Olympics showed no evidence of any participants wearing ankle monitoring devices. The Ukrainian Ministry of Youth and Sports and Ukrainian National Olympic Committee did not respond to a July 2024 email from NewsGuard seeking comment on the claim.

By McKenzie Sadeghi

THE FACTS: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) did not delete a video of the July 26, 2024, Paris Olympics opening ceremony from its official YouTube account. An IOC spokesperson said that the video has not been deleted, but that users in certain regions of the world are blocked from viewing it due to digital rights restrictions. NewsGuard confirmed that the video remains accessible in several countries.

On July 27, 2024, social media users shared a screenshot showing a YouTube video titled “Opening Ceremony Highlights” from the official IOC account, in which the video screen showed the message, “This video is not available.”

Sources spreading the claim suggested that the video had been taken down due to widespread criticism of a segment in the opening ceremony that some thought resembled a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. (The ceremony’s artistic director said that the scene depicted a “pagan celebration,” with the tableau intended to represent Greek mythology.)

In fact, an IOC spokesperson told French outlet Le Figaro that the video “has not been deleted,” stating: “We have retained digital rights only in certain global markets. Specifically, IOC has no digital rights in Europe and the UK, among others.” As a result, the video is not available in many countries, as the video is “geo-blocked in these markets, which explains why the videos cannot be viewed,” the spokesperson said.

Indeed, according to Polsy, a site which tracks the countries in which YouTube videos are available, the IOC video could still be viewed in nearly two dozen countries as of July 29, 2024, including Jamaica, Australia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

NewsGuard confirmed that the video is accessible from these regions using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a tool that can route a user’s internet traffic through a server in a different country.

By Joe Stonor

THE FACTS: A video purporting to show a warning from the Palestinian militant group Hamas threatening to attack the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris due to France’s support for Israel in the war is not authentic. The video does not appear on Hamas’s official social media channels or websites, and it is inconsistent with the group’s typical communication style and previous proclamations. Moreover, Hamas denied being behind the threat, and experts say that the video is likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign targeting the Olympics.

On July 23, 2024, pro-Kremlin social media channels and Arabic language websites circulated a video, supposedly issued by “Hamas Fighter” on X, showing a masked individual threatening to carry out acts of violence during the Paris Olympic Games due to France’s support for the “Zionist regime in their war against the people of Palestine.” The video ends with the individual holding up what appears to be a bloody severed head of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.

Although NewsGuard was unable to determine who produced the video, there is no evidence that it came from Hamas. NewsGuard did not find the video on Hamas’s official Telegram channel, the official X accounts of Hamas spokespeople, or on Hamas-affiliated websites — where such dire threats have previously appeared. Moreover,  NewsGuard did not identify any statements from the group taking responsibility for the threat. And there have been no reports from credible media outlets reporting on any threats from Hamas aimed at the Olympics. In a July 24, 2024, Telegram post, Hamas called the threat a “fabricated video.”

Terrorism experts also say that the video is inconsistent with Hamas’s messaging. In a July 23, 2024, thread on X, Tal Hagin, an open source researcher for the Israeli disinformation watchdog FakeReporter, noted multiple inconsistencies. For example, Hagin said that the video “doesn’t match the editing style of Hamas,” the person talking does not identify what group he supposedly belongs to, and Hamas’s official branding is not present, “which is very odd for this type of video,” Hagin said. “Based on the nature of the account, and the oddities in the video itself – It is likely an attempted disinformation campaign.”

By McKenzie Sadeghi and Eva Maitland, with contributing reporting from Chine Labbe

THE FACTS: Contrary to claims on social media, a video does not show an employee of the city of Paris pouring blue dye into the Seine river to make it look cleaner for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. The video was actually shot in the U.S. and was miscaptioned by social media users seeking to cast doubt on France’s readiness to host the Games, NewsGuard and French news outlets found.

The 11-second video shows a gloved hand pouring blue dye into greenish water from a motorboat and features on-screen text saying “POV: Paris coloring the Seine before the Olympics.”

A reverse image search by NewsGuard found that the original footage, which lasts 42 seconds and does not purport to show the Seine, was posted on May 12, 2024, by TikTok user @jeffhoffman04. The account holder told NewsGuard in a May 2024 phone interview that he is the owner of J.R. Hoffman Ponds, an Illinois-based pond management company. Hoffman told NewsGuard that the video shows a lake that his company manages in southern Illinois, adding, “That’s crazy that my video made it to France. But I can assure you J.R. Hoffman Ponds has never been on the Seine river in France. That [video) is a lake near Paducah, Kentucky.” There is no evidence or credible reporting that blue dye was poured into the Seine ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

By Natalie Huet

THE FACTS: French TV channels TF1 and France 24 did not report in March 2024 that Booking.com and Airbnb had seen mass cancellations for the Summer Olympics in Paris. This false narrative, which was first identified by TF1info.fr, was advanced by fabricated French TV news videos, and sought to portray President Macron’s stance in the Russia-Ukraine war as jeopardizing France’s key tourism sector.

One video claimed to show the French state-owned TV network France 24 reporting that online travel site Airbnb “has imposed restrictions due to mass cancellations” in March 2024 in the wake of “the radicalization of comments made by President Macron,” according to the video’s captions. However, France 24 said that it never produced such a video, and Airbnb told France 24’s fact-checking team in an April 3, 2024 article that the claims in the fabricated clip were “entirely false.” (In a March 14, 2024, TV interview, Macron did not rule out the possibility that Western troops could eventually be deployed in Ukraine.)

A separate video supposedly produced by French private TV channel TF1 showed an infographic falsely attributed to Booking.com, which claimed that the online reservation platform was also seeing mass cancellations of bookings made for the July-August Paris Olympics, with more than 5,000 cancellations recorded in a single day, March 25, 2024. TF1’s fact-checking team said the video was entirely fabricated, and Booking.com told the channel and France 24 that it had not issued these figures. An unnamed spokesperson for Booking told NewsGuard in an April 5, 2024, email: “Booking.com is not the source of these figures.”

The logos of French news agency Agence France-Presse and Insee, France’s official statistics agency, were used in another infographic, which was shared on Telegram and purported to show the “correlation between Emmanuel Macron’s speeches and the cancellation of reservations for flights to Paris, hotels and apartments in Paris, [and] tickets for events during the Olympic Games in Paris.” AFP told TF1 that this infographic was “entirely fabricated.” Insee press officer François Tugores told NewsGuard in an April 5, 2024 email: “Insee does not produce or publish data about ticket bookings for Paris 2024 Olympic Games competitions or about accommodation bookings.”

By Natalie Huet

THE FACTS : The Central Intelligence Agency did not issue an alert warning U.S. citizens against using the metro in Paris during the 2024 Olympic Games due to high threats of terrorism. U.S. officials have refuted the claim, and researchers have found that the narrative is part of a broader Russian disinformation campaign aimed at instilling fear among the public to discourage attendance at the Olympic Games.

Russia was banned from the games this year due to its invasion of Ukraine, although Russian athletes are able to participate as individuals.

Pro-Kremlin sources advancing this narrative cited a 30-second video carrying the seal of the CIA with on-screen text stating, “The terrorism threat level in the Paris metro has reached its peak. CIA experts along with the U.S. embassy in France are urging American citizens to avoid the Paris metro during the 2024 Olympics.”

In fact, a review of the CIA’s press releases and statements, travel advisories from the U.S. State Department, and security alerts from the U.S. Embassy in France’s website shows no such warnings about Paris metro threats during the Olympics. Moreover, there have been no credible news reports about warnings from U.S. officials advising against using the Paris metro.

Viginum, a French government agency that monitors foreign disinformation, said that the fake CIA video was created by a Russian influence operation dubbed Matryoshka, named after the Russian nesting dolls for its strategy of embedding layers of false narratives. According to a report from Viginum, the campaign aims to convince French and international audiences that the 2024 Olympics will be a failure and will not be able to proceed safely due to heightened terrorist threats.  

By McKenzie Sadeghi